Netanyahu to Go to Africa to Return Infiltrators

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declares war on illegal infiltrators and will fly to Africa to discuss sending them back home.

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

First Publish: 12/11/2011, 3:06 PM

Infiltrators in Ashkelon

Flash 90

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared war on illegal infiltrators at the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday and said he will fly to Africa to discuss sending them back home.

The Cabinet unanimously approved a government program to deal with the illegal immigrants, whose numbers have reached tens of thousands and present a clear and present danger to a Jewish majority in the country.

“I intend to travel to Africa later to discuss and advance procedures for returning them to Africa. In any case, this is unjustified…. These are very important steps to ensure the future of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” the Prime Minister told the Cabinet.

National Union chairman and Knesset Member Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz raised the alarm bells more than two years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that the flow of illegal Africans from southern Israel to metropolitan Tel Aviv woke up the government.

“This is a national problem in every field – the economy, society, infrastructures, social welfare and public security,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said Sunday.

“We hear the cries from Israel's communities and cities and we must see to the country,” he added at the Cabinet meeting. “We have no obligation to accept illegal infiltrators, and I separate this issue from that of dealing with refugees.

The number of refugees in this human flood is minute and we will continue to deal with refugees, war refugees and the like. But we are not talking about those here. We are talking about entire populations…, and if we do not act to stop this illegal flood, we will simply be inundated. He noted that the previous Olmert-Livni government decided to build a fence along the Egyptian border to stop the flow of infiltrators, but “nothing was done.”

He said that additional budget allocations will enable completion of the western section of the fence by the end of next year. The government also intends “ to greatly increase fines levied on employers” of the illegal immigrants.